Original title: Mental Health Problems and Social Media Exposure During COVID-19 Outbreak
Researchers surveyed adults in China during the COVID-19 outbreak and asked about social-media use and mental health. They used questionnaires to assess depression and anxiety. More than 80% said they were frequently exposed to social media. Frequent exposure was associated with higher odds of anxiety and of having both anxiety and depression, but the survey cannot show that social media caused these problems.
Imagine checking the news while waiting in a long queue. The more updates you read, the harder it can be to separate useful information from a flood of alarming reports. In this paper, frequent news-checking stands for frequent social-media exposure, and feeling worried in the queue stands for reported mental health problems; the survey found they occurred together, but it cannot show that one caused the other.
People facing a public-health emergency may encounter a flood of updates online. This study links frequent social-media exposure with anxiety and combined anxiety and depression, and calls attention to mental health and the spread of misleading or overwhelming information during emergencies.
The study was cross-sectional, so it shows an association at one point in time, not that social-media exposure caused mental health problems. The abstract does not describe the survey's representativeness, specific kinds of social-media content, or how long participants were exposed.
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Mental Health Problems and Social Media Exposure During COVID-19 Outbreak — Junling Gao, Pinpin Zheng, Yingnan Jia et al. — PLoS ONE — doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0231924
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.